[Ochi]

First off, let me assure you that I have a lot of respect for the developers of free software projects like this one, and I hope that it continues to evolve in the future. Still, from a user's perspective, none of the existing open source NLEs have fulfilled my needs, even though my needs are not that exotic.

I'm running a tiny YouTube channel for a few years now and I'm regularly releasing videos on it. I need to edit and render projects in the order of 2 hours or more on a regular basis. This includes simple color grading, cutting, multiple layers of videos and audio, simple effects and transformations (and it must run on Linux).

I have basically tried them all: The MLT-based editors Shotcut, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, as well as Blender and Cinelerra. I used Shotcut (which is made by the developer of the MLT framework) for a long time and also contributed at least a little bit, mostly with bug reports and hints where the problem may be in the code. I wanted to like Shotcut, but at the end of the day, all of the solutions were too slow, had too few possibilities to realize what I had in mind, or were too unstable.

After Shotcut even disabled the experimental and unstable feature of GPU-accelerated effects, which really helped to make it usable performance-wise, I finally gave up and tried one of the two commercial, cross-platform NLEs that I'm aware of (DaVinci Resolve). And even though - like I said - I wanted to like the open source alternatives, I have to admit that Resolve is on a whole different level regarding performance and possibilities. (Note that other editors like Kdenlive also support GPU acceleration, but at the end of the day this is a feature of the underlying MLT framework, and it showed that it was about as unstable in Kdenlive as in Shotcut.)

Maybe a NLE is just the kind of application that requires a big(ger) amount of dedicated (and possibly paid) work to really lift it to a level that actually makes it usable in the real world. Especially since the MLT framework is used by so many different editors, which appear to be developed independently, it would be worthwhile to join forces to develop one strong application and the framework itself.

P.S.: If you want to try the free version of Resolve, be aware that features like H.264 support and even audio output using non-Blackmagic-hardware is not available in the free version (not sure about the new beta of version 16), but they work beautifully in the paid version.

[windyaskew]

I used Shotcut to get me through my film certificate (video essay class, short film class, etc.) and it was difficult to work with. Random freezes and crashes left me very frustrated.

I switched to Flowblade [1] and it was so much better for my needs. I could do basic color correction without crashes and editing audio is much more powerful. All in all a better program (for my simple needs).

[1] https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/

[linsomniac]

I also really wanted to use a open source editor, but ended up in Resolve. In Windows even, which has shocked my friends. I spent probably around 4 hours trying to get Resolve working on Linux, several times, and just wanted to edit goddam videos.

Davinci Resolve is some next level stuff. Yes, I can do editing in some of the others (tried shotcut and kdenlive to edit a full video with). Resolve is just so much more advanced and capable, while also being easy to use for simple cases.

I tried Lightworks first, but really didn't like the "rent" model at $25/mo. Resolve free level has worked fine so far, and their paid version is quite reasonable at $300. Lightworks was good, but Resolve is great.

[baud147258]

I've used Shotcut for a 5-min film montage, about 10 h of work (with a part in learning to use the tool and some in cleaning/hiding noise I've made while filming (don't drink and film!)). During that time I've had a handful of crashes, which were horribly annoying as they were totally random and without any kind of recovery possibilities. For the rest it worked great and I didn't had any difficulty, except for choosing the rendering options: there are too many of them and I'm not a video specialist, here a handful of default (native, web, mobile…) would have been good, like other video editor have (I think Windows Movie Maker has them, for example).

[foobarbecue]

Same here. Tried all the free stuff and struggled along for years. Then bought Lightworks and it's like night and day how much more effectively I can edit videos.